Deciding Germany's Fate

By Thomas Powers

Published: December 1, 2002

THE CONQUERORS

Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945.

By Michael Beschloss.

Illustrated. 377 pp. New York:

Simon & Schuster. $26.95.

WHEN the battered German armies trapped in Stalingrad finally surrendered in January 1943, it became clear that the Allies -- Russia, Britain and America -- were certain to win World War II. But then what? How would the victors root out fascism, end the cycle of German wars and secure the peace? To these questions President Franklin D. Roosevelt had no ready answers, and it was not in his character to gnaw at problems in a methodical way; rather he would wait until inspiration came to him from wherever it is that ideas hatch. In the meantime his policy was evasion. So, rather than confront America's allies over ''war aims'' immediately, Roosevelt instead persuaded his friend Winston Churchill to join him in a pledge to fight on until Germany's ''unconditional surrender.''

These words were the principal fruit of the 10-day meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt at Casablanca in January 1943, and they predictably failed to satisfy Stalin, who wanted the democracies to open a second front on the mainland of occupied Europe. Stalin's objection was echoed everywhere: wouldn't the demand only make the Germans fight harder? But once uttered, ''unconditional surrender'' was carved in granite, and behind its bulk Roosevelt took shelter for the next two years: time enough to decide what to do with Germany when the war had been won.

Roosevelt was never more himself than at Casablanca. His inspiration caught Churchill by surprise, but he went along, and the two men never wavered thereafter: no deals would be made with Nazi Germany. It is Roosevelt -- brilliant, charming, unpredictable and dying -- who dominates Michael Beschloss's vigorously written history of postwar planning. Beschloss says he began ''The Conquerors'' a decade ago, set it aside and returned to it when new archives opened up. The delay gives the book additional impact: it arrives at a moment when Americans are again confronting a tangled question of war and peace -- how to remove a dangerous enemy from Iraq and build in its place what never existed there before, a stable democracy posing no threat to its neighbors. The problem strikes many observers as insoluble, but it is no more daunting than the one facing Roosevelt 60 years ago: only half the challenge was Germany's history of militarism; just as difficult were his quarreling advisers.

Ordinary Americans thought of Roosevelt as a rock, serene and confident, but he was a cipher to the men who worked with him. None ever knew his deepest plans, or what he told anybody else or when the presidential back would turn and they would be asked to step down. Beschloss is the author of half a dozen works of history with a special focus on how American presidents run the government and make decisions, and along the way he has learned to write with ease, confidence and a lively sense of character and scene. ''The Conquerors'' is built almost entirely around the conversations of high American officials trying to decide what to do with Germany. Two broad general ideas were on the table -- a plan by Roosevelt's old friend and secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to break Germany up into several small, pastoral states of yeoman farmers; and a more conventional proposal to get Germany quickly back onto its feet as a bulwark against the territorial appetite of a victorious Soviet Union.

The son of a rich businessman, Morgenthau fled the world of commerce for life as a gentleman farmer in upstate New York, where one of his neighbors was the future president. They became friends, Morgenthau worked hard in Roosevelt's political campaigns, and in 1933 Roosevelt surprised the world by naming him to run the Treasury Department. Morgenthau was the only Jew in Roosevelt's cabinet, or among the president's friends, and his tenure was unremarkable until the man who had celebrated his marriage, Rabbi Stephen Wise, brought him vivid reports, freshly arrived from Switzerland in the summer of 1942, of the Nazi campaign that would come to be known as the Holocaust.

The killing of Jews was no secret to governments or international organizations, but despite widespread knowledge of the basic facts few officials or religious leaders or even private citizens grasped that a radical new form of evil had entered the world. Morgenthau had little success in pressing the government to do something about it. Even a proposal to bomb the rail lines carrying trainloads of Jews to Auschwitz was rejected as a distraction from the war effort. Failing to halt or even slow the horror, he determined to ensure it would never happen again, and that, in his view, meant ending Germany's power to make war once and for all. To aides he described a Germany stripped of its industry as something like the used-up areas of Nevada deserts where only ghost towns, rusting machinery and abandoned mines remain.